close story-meta TORONTO — For a city striving to become a major technology center, it was a prize catch: A Google corporate sibling would spend the coming year planning a futuristic metropolis in a derelict part of Toronto’s waterfront. When announcing this fall that the company, Sidewalk Labs, would create a city of tomorrow, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada…
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Alphabet, Google, and Sidewalk Labs Start Their City-Building Venture in Toronto | WIRED
Google has built an online empire by measuring everything. Clicks. GPS coordinates. Visits. Traffic. The company’s resource is bits of info on you, which it mines, packages, repackages, repackages again, and then uses to sell you stuff. Now it’s taking that data-driven world-building power to the real world. Google is building a city.
Tuesday afternoon, public officials gathered in Toronto to announce that Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary under the Alphabet umbrella that also houses Google, will pilot the redevelopment of 12 acres of southeastern waterfront. Today the area hosts a few industrial buildings and some parking lots. In just a few years, it will be a techified community going by the name of Quayside. Sidewalk Labs has already devoted $50 million to the project, and Google will move its Toronto headquarters to the neighborhood. Once the company has proven out its concept, it plans to expand its redevelopment to the entire 800-acre waterfront area.
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